Something to Think About

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote a poem titled “Who am I?” He was a Lutheran minister about to be executed by the Nazis. He was able to answer the question with honesty.

Wayward Pines is a fictional place in America. Everyone has a lovely job, home and garden. The only catch is that you cannot ever leave Wayward Pines.

They cannot ever ask who they really are. The consequences to themselves are too grave to face. They delude themselves because they do not want to pay the price of being honest.

There are people today who would rather have the story that we are far better as people than we have ever been than face the truth. They embrace the claims of brilliance that we are more evolved, more scientific, more cultured, more open, more now than what we were then. Yet this is in so many ways a simple lie. Think of the numbers fleeing war torn countries, or even the number of broken homes in the UK alone.

To face the truth about ourselves can be daunting. What of the consequences? Imagine we don’t like what we discover? But what the Christian hope offers is a dealing with the truth where Christ deals with the consequences. The Gospel offers us a God who knows what it is to be tempted in every way, yet being without Sin. And how does God know this? Well not because he watched us from an ivory tower, but because he came down, so to speak, and was one of us. The good news is that he knows the truth and he alone can conquer it.

All we have to do is trust him. That was the devil’s first attack in Genesis 3. Not to get us to deny God, but simply not to trust him. We have been enslaved with the lie of self deception ever since.